“Dammit,” said Betsy, “he’d forgotten her, the first time he died.”
“Yes, as if in his heart she’d ceased to exist for him who knows how long ago. None of us noticed at the time. It was all so peaceful. I can remember thinking: How lovely to end your innings that way, so friendly, so nice, so serious. And a last heartfelt word for each of us. But yes, one name was explicitly left out….”
Armanda and Betsy looked sadly and quietly at the cups on the table in front of them. There had been nobody at the next one, at deathbed number two. So it was inevitable that everyone would start imagining all sorts of things, whether they were applicable or not.
And it hadn’t been a deathbed but a half-worn-out Bukhara rug on a herringbone parquet floor. Jan Brouwer was lying next to his desk, in the undisturbed consulting room on the first floor, when his wife found him, after calling and searching, at around four o’clock on the twentieth of October, 1980. The light in his eyes was already gone, but because of the bizarre course of events in the last year, she couldn’t believe it without further checking. She telephoned Doctor Goudriaan at once, couldn’t reach him, and called Armanda. Armanda had knelt down and was looking at the worried expression on her father’s face, with its eyes still open, making him look as if he were objecting to something, when the doctor on call came into the room. His rapid examination was no more than a ritual, an answer for wife and daughter.
“God, we were in such a state,” said Armanda. “I remember the two of us kept asking in unison: So? What do you think? Shouldn’t you call an ambulance? Shouldn’t we lift him onto the sofa? Couldn’t you do CPR right now?”
29
Out on the Oosterschelde
The mat of reeds sailed on. Hocke lay pressed tight against her back and hips. He had wrapped his left arm over her body and stretched his right arm next to hers and up over her head. She had let go of the stalks to twine her fingers into his. Lovers lie like that. The heavy black sleeve of her coat was pushed up a bit. The storm raged on unchanged, with wind gusts of seventy-five miles an hour over the water; it was simply shifting a little from northwest to northeast. The moon had reappeared with a bluish cast that negates all sense of depth and volume and gives everything a particular visibility, so that space itself acquires a perspective all its own, in defiance of all normally accepted theories. Lidy’s wrist, as bony as a child’s, trailed in a witch’s cauldron of sheer brute force. She had forgotten what a house is, or a marriage, or a family—that kind of thing is quick to go.
Lying in a reed bed engenders a sense of earth, of land, even despite the wetness. But this part of the landscape was moving, and moving with some speed, in a southeasterly direction, which didn’t mean much to Lidy anymore, as she had lost all idea of land. For the space in which she found herself alive, depleted and exhausted, but nonetheless alive, was an enormous unknown. The whole system—focal point, outlines, verticals—was heaving and surging in the uproar. Moon, clouds, and stars, which she had always believed belonged in the firmament, came up at strange angles out of what had become a wild waterscape to right or left. Yet her heart beat on, without anything she could have described as a fear of death. Her fingers held tight to Hocke’s. She had not forgotten what it is to want to live.
An hour passed in this fashion. Dusk. From time to time another squall of snow. About three feet away from her, another figure was lying in the flattened reeds. Gerarda Hocke. Lidy wasn’t clear, nor was she even wondering, if the old woman was still among the living.
The hunchbacked boy had been gone from them for quite a while now. When they lost him, it had been pitch dark. The section of floorboards they had been sitting on found itself above the dead-end street of Paardeweg near Nieuwekerl, a village in the process at that very moment of crumbling street by street. The floor planks went shooting over a flooded network of ditches, eddies, and little bridges, which together were causing an angular momentum, not that powerful in and of itself but wide-reaching. The shaking of the raft doubled and redoubled, because there was no letup. Visibility was almost zero. Yet as Cornelius Jaeger rolled off the raft, Lidy saw it, and saw for the first time that the child was in fear. Eyes are fine lenses, they don’t just capture light, they also emit it. As the boy lost his grip on the planks, he sent up a wordless plea for help with every ounce of will left in him. Lidy saw a pair of shiny green eyes, little facets, flat not curved, that contained nothing in the world that could be described as a look or an expression, just simply a signal that read Mayday, help … and indeed she literally flung herself forward.
Save him? Her? Action? To weigh this in a fraction of a second, in the belief that she was responsible for the suffering of the little hunchback? Not a moment later, she herself was thrown from the saddle.
Half water, half land. A hybrid of coastal vegetation that came from a bay on the north side of the polder of Sirjansland, part of which bordered the Grevelingen. The mat of reeds had already come an unimaginably long way. Lifted up and then helpfully supported by the flood, this mere line in the air had traveled ten miles to give three drowning people, Hocke, his mother, and Lidy, the feeling that they were crawling onto land. There is no need to remind anyone half drowned what that is. Land means territory, something in principle you can stretch out on. Even when it is saturated with sea and river water and the ever-thinning layer of silt. Formed by the North Sea, really no longer being held together by the roots underneath, you can drag yourself onto it, using your knees to work your way up, and feel you have reached dry ground. The old woman was more or less thrown onto it by a wave. Hocke and Lidy had to search for each other amid the floating wreckage of the storm, clutching then losing each other again among the cartons, branches, chests, sacks of potatoes, clothes, corpses, and bottles and finally just hoping for the best. The false island of reeds was still roughly seven feet by ten as it continued its journey. Lidy, very sleepy now, closed her eyes. The wind roared in her eardrums, the snow tasted of salt. Barely conscious, she knew that she and Hocke, wrapped in thick wet layers of fabric, made a single body. God, they were saved!
That had been an hour ago. But what is an hour when one is humbly embarked on the road to infinity? From now on, time, an element that is supposed to “pass,” would be absolutely worthless to both of them. A pair of lovers. Enclosed by sky and sea. Two beautiful people, in fact. Each potentially widowed from the first moment they met. As a boy, Izak Hocke had always assumed that when the time came he would marry his great love. Thereafter he remained a bachelor for years. Was there such a girl anywhere? Lidy, on the other hand, had been madly in love two or three times, when her impatience—and, naturally, her ovulation—made a decision one day at the end of February 1950. What are they doing here, body against body? Lidy, a tall white child of the city underneath her dark clothes, and Hocke, a farmer?
They don’t sleep, they’re at least half-awake. He lies there, his nose in the hair of the last woman of his life. The wind is like a sword slicing over their heads, there is no question of any caresses between them. But does that imply the most cold and cynical way a man and a woman can be with each other, with a total lack of “I love you”? Their bed of reeds is beginning to calve dangerously, particularly on Hocke’s side. Another moment or two, and they will interrupt their sentimental journey without much ceremony and go their separate ways. Lidy felt him from time to time pressed close against her back, and then for a time she wouldn’t feel him at all. Holding fast to his will to live, nourishing herself on it, continuing to do so whether the end of days had arrived or not. Lidy kept her fingers interlaced with his; cramped with cold, there was nothing else she could do.
They should have stayed like that. As if someone had set a glass bell over the two of them and arranged things so that ordinary time ceased to exist underneath. The two bodies bedded in the reeds no longer looked like those of ordinary mortals. Rather, they resembled sleepers in a fairy tale, in suspended animation, sleeping on in their muddy, ooze-filled clothes, dreaming on, existi
ng in a tempo all their own. Later, weary of this pathos that seemed already carved on a tombstone, they would stumble into time again. Or would they?
Meanwhile, time itself was not going to be stopped. Where there’s time, there are tides; it was almost ten o’clock and this one was already moving fast. That the mat of reeds came apart, and the section that Izak Hocke was lying on was too fragile to stay afloat in the power of the undertow, was attributable, first and foremost, to the moon, which dictates a timetable of six hours of rising water and six hours of sinking. Hocke loosed his fingers from hers. He needed them in order to cling onto something else. It’s ebb tide. Low water, a good thing, one would think, but in this case not. The water begins to try to find its way back to the sea through the opening in the dike. The flood turns and twists but is caught by the storm, which isn’t running out of time, and keeps on blowing with a relentlessness unknown to anyone who has lived here even since childhood; the water goes on being replenished from the north and continues to pile up.
The small portion of the mat of reeds broke off and sank. Hocke drowned. He swam a few strokes, but very rapidly his muscles became too cold.
She didn’t notice. As the reed island began to rock like crazy, she had thrown herself about and rolled away, because her inner command to herself was: Survive. She was caught and held by a soft figure crouched down like a hare, but still recognizable in the faint moonlight: the old woman. Who was looking over Lidy’s shoulder with terrible concentration in her eyes. Oh God, had she now risen again as one star in another constellation of two? Each incomplete without the other. Daughter, look, over there in front of that backdrop of hell, your mother. Sunday evening, a quarter past eleven: Gerarda Hocke and Lidy Blaauw found themselves in a swirling current moving toward something that would later be called “the hole of Ouwerkerk,” one of the largest breaches in what was originally the eighteen-foot-high dike of Oosterschelde.
They both felt it. Their mat was breaking up and more water was coming through on every side. As they were lifted on the crest of a wave and banged against a V-shaped double pylon reinforced by a crossbeam, the two women were immediately of one mind as to tactics. Up on their knees, they threw their arms around the rock-solid structure. In that moment, as the wave retreated again, they were able to pull themselves onto the crossbeam, where they could sit, suddenly a good three feet above the grip of the water. Thin cords whipped their faces. In the last moonlight that would shine through tonight, they saw that these were made of wire, torn telephone or electric cables. Lidy grabbed for them, wound them round the old woman’s waist and shoulders, and tied her fast. The next hours reduced her to a creature that could only fight against sleep, struggling to keep her eyes open regardless of the utter darkness all around them.
Did she go to sleep? Or simply remove herself for a moment from the uncertainties of the present as a way of making the best of her situation? Without being able to remember them, she was completely in the spell of the hours that passed, filled with snatches of the howling songs of the wind. Until, suddenly coming back to life, she felt the water slopping over her knees. The tide and the weather were running their course and the next one was coming in.
Lidy managed to untie the old woman in the dark. Standing on the crossbeam, they both felt the water, with a temperature of 36 to 37 degrees Fahrenheit, come creeping up over their knees and hips. Lidy wasn’t sure whether the high-pitched, mad singing that came from her right from time to time was real. The melodies, some familiar, some not, seemed intended to fix certain facts in her mind: the torso in her arms was going slack. Gerarda Hocke had lost the power to fight. But before she slid downward, she did manage to push two small objects into the other woman’s hand. Lidy’s fingers recognized the gold headdress clips. She shoved them into a coat pocket and realized that the old woman was no longer there. It would have been around three thirty in the morning when among all the flotsam and jetsam a door came sweeping past, within reach. Lidy was standing up to her shoulders in water, and she had to jump. In the attic of a farmhouse about to collapse, about a hundred yards away, a large family was still singing with all their might.
Lidy had not been particularly religiously brought up, but she loved songs, the more melancholy the better. So she carried the melodies of the psalms quite well in her head, and the words too, even if in fragments, and these words, as is often the case with songs too, when combined with the notes, come across as totally real, indeed believable. The family in the farmhouse had been singing psalms for hours, loudly, and intent on getting the words absolutely right. They were doomed, they probably knew as much, but were clinging to something beautiful, which might or might not be meaningless, but which they had built into their lives as a Given, to prevent themselves from being reduced to common clay. Lidy had managed to keep holding the dying old woman tight for a long time. During this interval, appropriately, given what was happening to the two of them, what had been echoing over in their direction, perversely but comfortingly, was “For he saves thee from the bird catcher’s net…. The days of man are but grass … take up Thy shield and Thy weapons….” The psalms of David, in the rhyming translations sanctioned in the eighteenth century by the ministers of Friesland, Gelderland, Zuid-Holland, Nord-Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Overijssel, and Drenthe.
So now she was on the door. A heavy, precious front door carried her along stretched out on her stomach. Monday had arrived some time ago. Monday morning, the second of February, 1953, between half past three and half past five. She kept her eyes open. She felt clear headed, focused, and full of memories. What does “forever” mean? Lidy remembered and would for the rest of her life remember the place where she was suddenly left totally to her own devices: an invisible place, although one with a faint blue glow circled by snatches of music that rose above the wind and came to her with the texts that had been sung so often in the course of time that they had become independent entities conveying no more than the quintessence of eternal longing.
It isn’t far from the area around Ouwerkerk to the Oosterschelde. Nonetheless it took Lidy about an hour. The raft kept bumping into things, spun around, was carried westward, then east, or came up against some passing object, a chunk of a barn, a sluicekeeper’s hut, a telephone pole, that came out of the black nothingness and disappeared back into it again. None of it bothered her. She seemed quite patient as she went into the last part of the night.
Thus it was that everything she still experienced was accompanied by the texts and nourished by them, as they echoed and reechoed in her head. “Take up Thy shield and Thy weapons …” Defiantly, shrilly sung verses that in no way decreased the howling of the wind, God knows, but acted as a commentary on it. A projectile slammed into her leg, she flinched in shock, but it didn’t really hurt. Once she got a brief but absolutely clear look at the overpowered landscape around her, the dikes heaved this way and that, the remains of farmhouses from which loud cries for help still came here and there. Then she had to reach wildly for whatever was at hand.
She was there. A kind of waterfall was pulling the door downward, but miracle of miracles, she didn’t fall underneath. The breach in the dike at Ouwerkerk was so huge that it could no longer be called a breach, there was simply no dike left. Half past six. The flood tide was still high, and the storm was still relentlessly driving the water from the north. Lidy lay half on her left side, her face on one arm, her legs spread, her feet turned to the side. Her little boat, with neither engine nor oars, obeying the current and the wind, was on direct course for the Oosterschelde, which leads straight into the North Sea. She was trembling uncontrollably, long past the point now where she could ask herself who she was, but still saying softly in her heart: “Here. I’m here!”
30
Ousted
It was one of those suddenly very cold December mornings that transport a country into a state of excitement, disbelief, good feelings. The weather reports for the beginning of the week had used words like “dry,” “overcast,” “
mild,” and had spoken of a moderate wind out of the southeast. The idea that the day begins with frozen water pipes and ice blooming on the windows of your car, which refuses to start, is therefore pretty far-fetched. Nadja and Armanda were in the train going from Amsterdam to Goes by way of Rotterdam and Bergen op Zoom. The rush hour was over, and the carriage wasn’t that full. They sat in facing window seats, looking out at the patches of white and the quiet sky, an optical phenomenon that struck them both as having a remarkable affinity with the purpose of their journey. A funeral, but not of anything that could be understood as a dead person or even a dead body. After more than thirty years in silt, what remains of a human body is little more than some bones, two jaws, a skull. Armanda and Nadja stared out at the thin, fresh layer of snow, the result of a trough of pressure that had moved southward over the North Sea during the night, and let their conversation lapse for a while. Since Monday of the previous week they had known that Lidy—maybe—had been found.
Their shocking return to her trail, long abandoned, totally lost, had begun a month before. On the aforementioned Monday afternoon, Armanda had received a call from a representative of the local police, who asked her if he was speaking to Mrs. Brouwer. Within the hour a man in street clothes, with soft gray eyes and a sailor’s beard, was sitting at her table. He informed her, wanted at least to give her the information, that they had first gone looking for Mr. Blaauw, then for the Brouwer family, who had once lived on Sarphati Park, but then quickly switched to the question that was burning in her eyes. Lidy Blaauw-Brouwer. Indeed. You would like me to tell you where?
A short silence. Another glance. In the mud near the Schelphoek, the construction site behind the secondary dike on the northwest bank of the Oosterschelde, right near where one of the three great river channels, the Hammen, drains into the estuary and where they’ve been building the gigantic flood barriers for years now—
The Storm Page 23
